Recentley a few MMO games have come out that have put up some compition. The 2 big ones being Star wars the old republic and Star Trek Online
TORtanic dethroning WoW? No. Star Trek Online? Never heard of it. WoW has more than 10 million subscribers. They aren't being "dethroned" any time soon.
Seeing as WoW still has the massive amounts of income due to the ridiculous subscriber system, I doubt Blizzard even cares. I personally think not a single game exists (or will exist) that is worth paying monthly fees for, but to each his own, I guess.
Unlikely. Both TOR and STO are sci-fi while WOW is a fantasy game. They attract different audiences and with the enourmous amount of other sci-fi mmorpgs out there, the genre is clogged and alot of players won't go to either of the new ones. Think about it. A couple of months ago [before TOR was even anounced] I looked for a good free mmo. I found hundreds of them and entire sites dedicated to just listing and rating them. From what I saw, there were far more sci-fi than fantasy. The market is oversaturated. You have to offer something big to pry players away from the free ones and convince them to play games that they must pay for.
I think World of Warcraft lost some subscribers before The Old Republic came out. Note I heard this from a Machinima show.
lol everytime a decent mmo comes out, there is allways the question, can it kill wow? and the answer allways was: No! I was into wow for a long time, i tried Rift, SWTOR and a couple other mmos over the years and honestly none ever came close to the whole package blizzard can deliver. I mean SWTOR is basicly a clone (not that wow didn't copy) of wow with a voice acted story, set in SW lore. But everything else scream wow at me, but sadly it just doesn't come close to it. And i am quite convinced the only thing that is able to kill wow, is wow. Or when Blizzard releases a new mmo, they might deliberatly kill it.
I personally play when there is good company. I find the mechanics of MMORPGs to be frustrating and only worth the trouble if there are people who I know playing with me. Otherwise, I will just play a single-player RPG. Even FPS's get old. I don't play Combat Arms anymore because my clan fell apart.
Well right now, WOW will stay in control, but it will slowly start losing its play base over time if more MMORPG games came out, and the market became more saturated.